Michael Shermer with Dr. Ken Miller — How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will

[Music] so our speaker today our guest today Kenneth R Miller is the author of the new book the human instinct that we'll be talking about in depth in a moment he's a biology professor at Brown University and the author of the critically acclaimed only a theory and finding Darwin's God both of these covered a lot of science and religion topics so I was surprised that there is no God in this book at all in fact this book could have been written by an atheist which made me think have you come over to the dark side yet Michael I am praying for you my soul to be saved well nevertheless we we give you a official skeptic pin there's this summer's and by the way we asked I have a wine sponsor Michael McCarran makes engraved wine bottles for corporate events and things like that so he's our wine sponsors there's a nicely engraved bottle of wine with your book cover then all I have to do is figure out how to get past TSA you never checked luggage I could well we can mail it to you we'll talk okay alright very much alright alright I mean what does it say a perky little vintage or something like that yes that's right and we have two special guests today Donal Prothero and Ed Larson Don's are longtime paleontologists geologists leader of our geo tours longtime speaker and editor and author of skeptic articles and ed Larson is the author of the summer of the Gods the Pulitzer prize-winning book on the Scopes trial Scopes Monkey Trial so I've asked both of them don't make a few comments today after our dialogue before the Q&A in which they can comment on some of these great questions we will be dealing with some of the the biggest topics there are because you deal with those and so the subtitle the book kind of explains at least which direction we can take how we evolved to have reasoned consciousness and freewill before we get into this though you testified in the Dover trial the very famous Dover trial in 2005 what's happened since then how do you feel with 13 years of perspective about the intelligent design movement where it's gone what your role was in killing it or we're not okay well the I like to tell people that the the whole Kitzmiller trial was my fault and the reason for that is my co-author and I Joe Levine had just come out with a brand new high school biology textbook it's known by everyone who uses it as the Dragonfly book because it has a beautiful image of a dragonfly on the cover and the the in the small town of Dover Pennsylvania Dover Area High School the science department which consists by the way of for people that's how small the high school is was told that the board finally had enough money to purchase new biology textbooks and they looked around they tried to find a book that met the Pennsylvania state standards and they settled on our book for which I was very grateful of course but then that they had to present it to the so called curriculum committee of the school board and unbeknownst to many of the people in town fundamentalist Christians had just sort of taken over a majority on the school board at the most recent elections and the chair of the curriculum committee a fella named William Buckingham examined the book and he discovered not only that it had a chapter on evolution and at a unit on evolution and when he read further he discovered evolution was written throughout the book you couldn't even skip the unit that get away for that evolution ray and at one point he told a local TV interviewer from cover to cover this book is laced with Darwinism and you know how when you publish a new book you put quotes on the back to help sell it Joe and I have talked about let's put that quote on the back and we'll take that as an endorsement the lace through is so it turns out that this the selection of this book was a provocative act as far as the school board was concerned because it had so much evolution in it and they told the teachers well we're going to let you have the book but only if you do two things one is if you prepare an intelligent design curriculum over the summer to present as an alternative to evolution and also we're going to provide you with two classroom sets of an intelligent design textbook called of pandas and people and that's where things started to roll right right and I was called up by the local representative for my publisher who said Ken there's some issue about your textbook in this small town and I said don't worry about it I've dealt with this sort of thing before I'll find who to talk to on the web and I called up the superintendent of schools found his name on the web and phone number and I've done this many times before and what I would usually tell to the superintendent or the science supervisor is give me the names of the people on the Board of Education who are concerned about our book I'll call them up directly I'll have a chat with them I'll convince them that this book represents the science main scientific mainstream the authors of this book include a practicing Catholic in an observant Jew or certainly not anti religious and usually that's that and more often than not when I would do this to a superintendent or a principal or a science supervisor they'd say oh thank goodness you take these guys off my hand please what the superintendent in Dover said was that's very interesting please don't take any action and if I'd like you to do anything I'll call you oh boy and that was a little strange yeah and I didn't know quite know what's going on then I decided well I'm gonna call it the chair of the science department a wonderful woman named Bertha spar and Bertha immediately I'm sorry I forgot Knight emailed her first and Bertha then called me up at my office and said no more emails and I said excuse me I didn't even know who you are I just said he sees that emails are discoverable Oh and she said we're gonna talk about this over the phone oh my god and she told me that she and her fellow teachers had adopted a strategy and the strategy was at the risk of losing their jobs they simply would not assist in any way in the intelligent design curriculum and they stood up in front of the school board and they said exactly that well there would not have been a kids Miller case without those heroic teachers into her Area School District they they deserve all the praise they could possibly get for standing up for the integrity of science so for me that's the lead up yeah now I don't know how long you want me to go on because I can give a whole lecture about the testimonies well Nova had that sort of docudrama which an actor a judgement day that was that was to me very distressing it's very unusual to see yourself played by an actor the other thing is anybody in this room can already tell how I talk and quick talking guy grew up in New Jersey I'm near New York City this is the way I talked and testified in court and for some reason the actor who played me in the Nova series decided here is how an Ivy League college was sort of a highly-educated pseudo English accent and I found it distressing but that that was accurate yeah it was word-for-word right in other words you know they they used they used the actual transcript of the trial but I'll put in I don't know if anyone is here from the legal profession but I bought put in one good word for the legal profession about four or five months before the trial began I was in Philadelphia for a scientific meeting and the two private attorneys who were taking the case pro bono from a you know a sort of a big mean corporate law firm this was the good that they wanted to do took me out to dinner in a very fancy restaurant they said let's talk about the case it was the meal was wonderful but I came away deeply depressed because I thought these guys don't know RNA from DNA they don't even know what the fossil record is they want to know if they can get it on CD I'm gonna have to carry this thing by myself these guys are hopeless by the time the trial began these attorneys had at least a master's and maybe a PhD level understanding of evolution the way in which they absorbed knowledge and applied it at the trial was absolutely astonishing and the other remarkable thing about this is the we knew we were going from in front of a conservative judge a lifelong Republican a protege of Governor Tom Ridge and a judge who have been recommended for the bench by then senator Rick Santorum okay so none of us knew what to think and he had Bonavita bonafide his conservative credentials he was incredibly fair-minded he was incredibly straightforward and he also had an incredible sense of humor and at one point during my testimony on the first day in a courtroom you can't give a lecture you have to structure it in terms of question and answer as you know well that's how we structured it and we then had a series of court approved demonstrative which you and I would call PowerPoint slides which we showed to illustrate my answers to various questions and at the end of about a two and a half hour session it was a little afternoon time it was obvious the judge wanted to break for lunch and he raised his gavel to sort of end the morning session and he said not court dismissed when he thought deeply and he said class dismissed and and to steal a phrase that's when I realized this guy was a real Mensch yeah yeah yeah so was it evolution was the goal to prove evolution is true that intelligent design is false or it's not science whatever it is well here's the thing in a civil lawsuit the plaintiffs have to present their case first right so I knew that I would be followed several weeks later by the store expert witness for the school board that was Michael Behe biochemist from Lehigh University author of Darwin's black box and probably the scientist in the intelligent design movement at the time with the best scientific credentials so I had three things we had three goals the first thing is our textbook was an issue in this trial so one of the things I wanted to make clear is how a couple of working scientists like myself and Joe Lavigne put together a textbook in terms of not just our personal views but reflecting the scientific consensus dealing with things in an objective and dispassionate way and I wanted to under make sure the court understood that process the second point that we wanted to do was to explain the scientific underpinnings of the theory of evolution in terms that apply into structure to physiology to genetics and to molecular biology so it'd be very clear that the word theory in this case doesn't mean a hunch yes hypothesis this means ace broadly tested explanation that unites hundreds of thousands of observed scientific facts into a single explanatory framework and that's what a scientific theory like the theory of evolution is but then the third thing was I knew I'd be followed by B so it was very important that I explained to the court in advance what dr. B he would say when he got on the stand and then explain in advance why it was wrong and if I had and we talked about this a lot in preparation if I had unfairly explained what he was going to say if I had set up a straw man or something along those times we would have basically set the stage for B he to come in and say I've been misrepresented here's what I really think and I would not have had a chance to rebut right so therefore the key here was to explain how he used the famous bacterial flagellum as an as an example of irreducible complexity why that example was wrong how he used blood clotting as an example of something that required intelligent design and then I had to explain to the court we really do know a lot about blood about the evolution of the blood clotting system and so forth and I believe I did so effectively the reason I did so effectively the reason I say that is because when I read the decision point after point when he discussed dr. Bailey's testimony he said but Miller explained this and Miller did that and Miller did the other so is it the problem that they their science is wrong or they're not really even doing science - for - this is this is an incorrect idea it's empirically disprovable you can't always prove things in science but you sure as heck can disprove them so that's that's really the first thing the second thing is there's very very few attempts on the part of the Discovery Institute which had funded the intelligent design movement or any of the other boosters of intelligent design to really do the kind of scientific work that anyone would regard as the activity of a curious scientist who just wanted to find things out right um there are a few experiments that are done by a number of scientists and is a guy named Douglas axe who works in a Research Institute of sorts and publishes papers that are designed to show that certain faults in a protein are unavailable cannot be reached by evolutionary methods these are fairly weak experiments they're easily refuted but what you don't see is the way a genuine scientist attacks a scientific problem with open-minded curiosity and with a vigor to try to basically put together an explanatory explanation so in your sense that I mean my feeling is that that the oh five OH six trial decision pretty much closed the door for creationism species of all kinds is that your sense - or the sense of bubbling up here and there god I wish you were right like one of the good things that happened I can tell you two things in the aftermath immediately which is the state of Ohio was considering State Board of Education was considering a series of recommended lessons before the Ohio science curriculum that would have included lesson that were basically an intelligent design after the Kitzmiller trial activists in favor of science brought with a kiss' miller decision to the attention of those on the Ohio Board of Education who were wavering and they basically they decided they did not want to have another Kitzmiller trial in Ohio and they reversed that so that was highly influential the second the second good outcome from this is I had actually been involved in a court case a year earlier in Georgia and this was the Cobb County text sticker day suit yeah and in Cobb County a group of citizens prevailed upon the Board of Education to attach a warning sticker to every biology textbook purchased in the district sort of like a pack of cigarettes and it said on it this test book textbook has material on evolution evolution is a theory not a fact regarding the origin of living things and so forth and this was famous sticker case well a heroic guy named Jeff Salman a New York City transplant and five other parents sued arguing in federal court arguing that this was an attempt to promote not just religion but a particular sectarian view of religion and therefore was constitutionally impermissible I actually testified in the first day of that trial as well at the invitation of Jeff and his attorney and we won the case but there were procedural abnormalities in this in the way the judge structured it and one that I became aware of in the in the Kitzmiller case in Kitzmiller I was prepped sworn in and deposed as an expert witness in the Cobb case I simply showed up as a fact witness and that was probably an appropriate given the kinds of questions I was asked so that was valid cause for appeal by the Board of Education which did appeal and the federal circuit court sent it back to the district court for a retrial the school board's attorney said we're ready to go we're gonna retry the case and we're gonna keep the stickers in the textbooks hmm what then happened was the victorious attorneys in the Kitzmiller case contacted them and they contacted me and they contacted kevin Padian from Cal Berkeley who had been another expert witness in the Kitzmiller case and said if you want to go to trial with this again you're not getting the legal team that was down there in Cobb Salman versus Cobb County before you're getting the full Kitzmiller team and that's and that's what you will have to contend and the attorney the school board's attorney then went back to the board and said let's settle this and let's take the stickers out right now in terms in terms of bubbling up again but I know there is maybe the top down strategies using the legal system are not going to work so they're gonna have to do something from the bottom up but they are no they are and you can go to the National Center of Science education website and you can find a state-by-state account of state legislators that have introduced bills to water down or weaken or altogether strike the subject of evolution and for that matter climate change and for that matter stem cell research and so forth from the curriculum and right now there is a serious attempt by officials in the state of Arizona to basically remove evolution from the required life science curriculum in that state and this is a serious issue that people in that state and others should be concerned about this issue has gone away wow that's unfortunate these I guess the problem other people in other countries have is not seeing that we don't have a center of national board of education it says this is the science that's going to be taught it just comes down to local Boards of Education of counties yes so there must be thousands of possibilities that ya know I think that I think that's true education by tradition United States is a local function and I think that as someone who has been active in my own local local educational system the public system where I live in Massachusetts I think that's an important feature it gives citizens direct involvement it doesn't basically put it in the hands of a distant federal government but it certainly leads to the kind of balkanization that we are implying on the other hand it also makes it very hard for a national authority to impose its will on individual school districts and one example of a national government doing that is the country of Turkey in which the federal authority essentially outlawed the teaching of evolution in the public schools and the explanation from the Prime Minister's Office was this is a very complicated subject and it's too difficult for Turkish youth to understand and as a result and as a result evolution is disappearing from schools in in the country of Turkey right to get undergraduates at Brown that are creationists or you don't know did they say anything oh yeah yeah I do I mean Brown is a famously liberal place yeah and everybody knows that in fact very liberal but I have to tell you every year teach in the spring a a very large first-year freshman biology class this year ID 350 students in Wow they're wonderful kids they're very enthusiastic I have a wonderful crop of teaching assistants half of whom themselves are undergraduates who really throw themselves into this course and we do all sorts of cool things we do DNA sequencing I have students bring in food from the cafeteria I show them how to test it to see if it's been genetically modified and they do also they do all sorts of stuff it's it's really interesting interesting course to teach but every year I get two or three kids and this year this year only had one but two or three is the average who will come and see me and because they're freshmen and because I'm a full professor they are very polite and they always say tap on the door are you busy and so forth and so on and they asked this question in a very roundabout way about evolution and what they'll be required on exams and so forth and when I realize where they're going I want to say wait a minute you want to know if you have to believe in evolution it's again an a don't you and I said and what I said though the student came this year and I said what did I lecture about yesterday she goes the Krebs cycle and I said I don't believe in the Krebs cycle she said what I said I don't believe in the Krebs cycle I don't believe in DNA I don't believe in RNA here's what I understand the role that the krebs cycle plays an intermediary metabolism I understand and accept the scientific evidence for it and I also understand why the biochemical community founds finds the cycle to be a persuasive explanation for how we break down carbs fats proteins and other compounds in order to generate chemical energy all that I care about with evolution is that you understand the scientific evidence for it that you understand why the scientific community finds it persuasive and also that you understand its implications belief doesn't play a role in science very understanding does and that usually diffuses the situation because it means I'm not going to grab them and throw them up against the laboratory wall and say do you believe in which is the fear that many of them have I think a lot of conservative and Christian brains autocorrect evolution to atheism immorality communism whatever and that's what they're really asking do I have to believe these other things that I don't want to if I have to accept this kreb cycle and so on and yeah there was that there was a comment made at a school board hearing in Kentucky a couple years ago and got headlines saying that the new next generation science curriculum which is a national curriculum that states states adopt voluntarily criticizing the evolution that was in it was one of the four pillars of the life sciences and the critics said these new evolution standards are socialist and fascist I have a daughter who teaches US government and political science at a local high school she emailed me with that headline this the reason I found out of it the next day and say dad do the people who said that realized that socialism and fascism are opposites actually a lot of people don't know that it really can well my answer was I'm pretty sure that all that person knows is that they're bad words yeah yeah and by applying those bad words to evolution they think they've criticized it I think the word belief it shouldn't even be used in scientific context in that way it's like do you believe in liberal democracy is a different thing then do you believe in climate change or something like that yeah I believe for example the Red Sox have a pretty good show and the American the American American League and certainly is not an empirical boy it's what shaped by sentimentality and a certain amount of judgment but the idea of belief in science runs counter to the idea that every single thing in science is potentially disprovable what I tell my graduate students is we only have one dogma in science and that is that science has no Dogma right take it from there all right yes I like to make the point on the idea of consensus in science it's not like a democracy where you guys all meet on the weekends and bow right it's that there's independent lines of inquiry this sort of convergence of evidence conciliate some inductions that all jumps to the same conclusion most of the time these scientists don't even know each other they go to different conferences they published in different journals and and the same thing with climate climate and evolution science so you'd have to refute each and every one of those not just some general idea which is yeah and and and actually I'll make two points one is I often run into people who think well you talking about me you can't possibly speak out against evolution even though you probably know it's not true because all scientists are together is there an conspiracy right and my answer is have you ever been to incentive anything have you seen a shouting and yelling at each other the notion of a conspiracy that would silence Sciences is hilarious the other point that you made about multiple lines of evidence converging there's a very famous letter I believe in 1996 that of all people pope john paul ii wrote to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and he talked about the theory of evolution and he said the convergence of so many lines of evidence and by that he meant molecular biology genetics biogeography paleontology its convergence neither expected nor sought was one of the most powerful arguments in favor of the theory of evolution so when I'm in front of religious audiences and I want an argument for authority from Authority in favor of evolution I go with the Pope isn't that the one where he said except for the soul at the an insolvent point science ends when I wrote the book finding Darwin's God one of the first things that happened to me when it came out is I was literally summoned by the theology department of Providence College across town in Providence which is a Dominican University and I went there happy to do it and was grilled by the theology and philosophy professors there and the first question is what is your position on insolvent and my answer was what does that mean okay and they then explained it to me and I'm a lifelong Catholic so I shouldn't have had to have explained to me yeah but what john paul ii was trying to do is to say look there are certain beliefs that people of faith have and one of those is in the reality of a spiritual self and this is question the existence of the spirit the existence of the soul this is a non scientific question it's beyond the province of science to investigate and therefore evolution properly says nothing about it so to that extent do you still endorse Steve Gould Sonoma non-overlapping magisteria certain questions that science can't answer although a lot of them I think we can take a shot at but something like insolvent or the resurrection or something like this is maybe just out of bounds there's no way to test it well a couple things what is Steve was a friend of mine I taught at Harvard for six years before I went to brown Steve and I served on a committee together we became good friends we bonded over baseball of all things of course and I really didn't realize who he was I knew I knew he had a lab in the museum and he worked on snails but that's all I knew quite seriously until I got interested in evolution to discover it oh my god as Jay Gould has tingle all these books absolutely amazing and in 1982 not long after I came to brown I hosted him for seminar and he showed up in my office he had been named scientist of the year that year by Discover Magazine so there's a photo crew there so he shows it in my office and after we talked about a few things he pulled out of his briefcase the most beautiful envelope I have ever seen on this parchment vellum paper and there was a yellow and white ribbon around it and a wax seal which he had broken to open it and it was this beautiful invitation from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to attend a meeting in Rome at the Vatican on evolution and its meaning for the human species and he said Ken you're a Catholic right and I said yeah and he goes what do you know about the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and I said well I don't know much except I do know that the church things they kind of mishandled the whole Galileo yeah and and they don't want to get into that again right so the Pontifical Academy has eminent scientists Nobel laureates who meet periodically for purely scientific reasons but also when asked will offer advice to the Holy See on questions of science and then Steve looked at me and said does the Pope know that I'm a Jewish kid from Brooklyn and I decide to have some fun with him and I the Pope knows everything but if you take that date 1982 and you follow Steve's columns in Natural History magazine which are still worth reading all of them you discover his attitude towards religion mellowed after 1982 and 1983 and that's when Noma came out right and I think part of that was for the first time in his life he went to a conference and met large numbers of people whom he could respect as a scientist who are also people to faith and I think that that ultimate list is a ontogeny of non-overlapping magisteria now I've read and reread rocks of Ages which is the book in which this is advanced I think it's a fruitful way of thinking but I think in some respects it's too clever by half and the reason for that is science and faith can't run in completely separate troughs science tells us about the nature of the world and understanding the nature of the world I think is essential for people of faith I don't think one can be an informed religious person without being literate and understanding and supportive of science and I also don't think that that science can exist without lessons in terms of moral lessons in terms of the imperative how we treat fellow human beings without some lessons from people of faith that doesn't mean it's necessary for scientists to be religious but it does mean that science evolved if you will within the Western religious tradition basically the idea that human beings are made in the image of God and therefore all human beings are entitled to respect and it's very interesting to me that even though in in technological terms many Eastern societies in China and other places we're more advanced than medieval or early Renaissance Europe was the scientific view the scientific perspective of seeing humans as apart from nature and therefore becoming an objective observer that's something that developed out of the Western Abrahamic tradition and we see that not just in the Christian countries of Western Europe but also in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and northern Africa where there was an enormous flowering of science in the 13th 14th and 15th centuries so I think basically people in science should realize that to the extent that science is a cultural production it is a cultural production of the Abrahamic way of looking at the world in our relationship to Google kind of separated questions like meaning morality belong to religion and science has nothing to say about that well there's a lot of us to think it can say something about that and in fact in reading your book I sort of felt like you're addressing some of those deeper questions that now maybe some religious traditions get some things right simply by having a theory of human nature by observation like the golden rule and it's metallic variations is something like reciprocal altruism and say very much the kinds of Halsey and adjust society where you don't know who you're gonna be in the in the group so you have to kind of put yourself in the other perspective so those are the kinds of things religions kind of figured out it's not super rocket science - if you just interact with other people you know that that they feel like you do but but but so why should they be separate and so that brings me to your new book again there's no religion in here you which I like you what you just wanted to argue purely from reason and empiricism towards some of these answers to some of these deeper questions and my feeling was that you were arguing against probably Dawkins most famous quote that several of us have used I think this was in River Out of Eden the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil and no good nothing but blind pitiless indifference so you can see when the average person reads that and thinks that's evolution that's a Darwinism I have to take that I mean that's pretty bleak is it's pretty bleak yeah to tell you in 2002 I was I shared the platform with Richard at a conference on faith and secularism the United States at NYU and this the first time I'd actually met him and Richard has always treated me very generously I consider him a friend he said nice things about me in The God Delusion pointed out a few other things he's recommended my book to Christian in Britain who want to understand evolution so he's a good guy as far as I'm concerned but I from memory I threw that quote at him and I said Richard how do you manage to get up in the morning right and I want your listeners and viewers to imagine this in the best Oxford accent and that is well the universe may not have a purpose what I do full-stop yeah . but but but to me the interesting thing about that and when I went when I lecture to laypeople I will often show the Dawkins quote and then I will say here's a counter quote and the counter quote is that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom the work of a Provident and purposeful God intent upon human meeting a tent upon giving humans meaning to their lives and intent on an ethical system in which we exist now that is not a scientific statement and I'm very quick and happy to point that out but do you know what Dawkins statement is not a scientific statement either what you're saying I think when you say there's no sense there's no purpose in the universe yeah that must mean there's a scientific test for purpose and I don't think there is it depends what you mean by the word purpose so the purpose of the star is to convert hydrogen into helium when it hits a certain temperature and pressure and that's what it's designed to do by the laws of nature and it does it so that's purposeful behavior in a way it just like river runs downhill or or species reproduce or you know whatever the basic instincts I I might say you're confusing purpose with function well but okay that's fine but but the words we use do have certain meanings and we mean different things by them I think what Richards after there is that the average person thinks to get purpose there has to be something outside of the system indeed that validates it and he's saying there is no such thing so it has to come from within but as I take your book is that you can derive it from the bottom up just evolution designed us to have functions so our functions are to have certain drives towards something so and that starts with the second law of thermodynamics entropy everything's running down so the whole point of that sort of the first law of life is the second law of thermodynamics it's a push back against entropy to capture energy and use it and process it and so on that's purpose if maybe that's to base a use of that word but from there you can build I think much follows yes I think you're right now you remarked a couple times that there's no religion in this book and one of the reasons for that is frankly I wanted to reach a wider audience and for me the driving force is what I consider the rather bleak view of human nature and human significance that one can get by reading certain very very able popularizers of evolution and it's quite easy not just to read Richard Dawkins but to read a host of other people who will say there's nothing special about human beings were just one animal among many our existence is not significant at all and then furthermore we are so intensely programmed by the realities of natural selection that ethics morality meaning all of these things are simply illusions and therefore there's a lot of sound and fury in here signifying nothing this Dale phrase from William Faulkner and and and and that view has caught on with a lot of people who are not opponents of evolution or not creationists and the example that I use most cogently in the book is Marilyn Robinson the the the great writer the Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote several years ago a book called the death of Adam and the longest essay in that book is one called on Darwinism and she's not an anti evolutionist so she's not a creationist but by Darwinism she means an interpretation of evolution that in her view debases the humans human spirit that that that that belittles human existence and basically says we are nothing more than another beast and our existence is of absolutely no significance I think that's an unduly bleak view of evolution I think Robinson has got that wrong but she certainly can quote an awful lot of popularizers of evolutionary who take exactly that point of view and what I was writing the drafts for this chapter these chapters in this book my editor was constantly talking with me at Simon & Schuster about what's the bottom line where are you going with this what's the bottom line and when I finally sent her the draft on I think it was for chapter 5 she called me up and said I finally figured out what your book is about it's a pep talk for the humans yeah I think that's right it's an optimistic view rather than a pessimist into you of this bottom-up process so let's just start with let's just go through the big three reason consciousness and pretty well and then we can get to more religious issues at the end if we want but so we think about the purpose or function of a heart is to pump blood kidneys is to clean blood and so on what's the purpose or function of a brain I mean that's really kind of what what is reason what is it we're able to do and somehow dogs can't do it like we can do it and somewhere between australopithecine chip sized brain two Homo erectus and Neanderthals and us something happened where the quantitative increase of neurons or neural structures or neural networks or something something the way it's usually put is the lights came on but but I think if more of is a dimmer rather than a switch and it's just coming on more and more and somewhere whatever we we use the word reason like it's a special thing it is a special thing but but it's just a gradation more than what you know simpler structures can do so what's the to talk to us about the brain what its purpose is in that sense like a biologist would any other organ well I'm a biologist and to me biologically the brain is just another organ and we see brains we see complicated nervous systems in what we sometimes call the higher animals what we see them in simpler animals as well one of the organisms that I'd my lab doesn't study but a lot of the lamps at Brown do study is a tiny little tiny little nematode called Sina Reb Titus elegans it's a beautiful little thing under the microscope it has just under a thousand cells and we know the names of every one of those cells that's why we study it it's about three maybe four millimeters long so it's really small and it's a great model system to study development particularly of the nervous system and what the small brain of this little worm enables it to do is to react to the environment to coordinate its own functions to control muscle groups in an organized way this worm wriggles in it swims in order to do that you need a brain that to control those muscles in an orderly fashion the majority of the cells that I'm pretty sure about this the majority of cells in our brains are doing the same thing because the cerebellum in the back of the brain which coordinates the various functions of the body in the limbic system and so forth that's really packed with cells to a greater density than other parts of the brain so that's one of the functions what's happened in to the human brain however compared to our primate relatives is extraordinary and one of the things that's absolutely striking is from about 4 million years ago until about 1 million years ago which is a geological instant the brain more than tripled in size and thinking about an organism in which one organism one sorry thinking about an organism in which just one organ tripled in size relative to the others that's extraordinary yeah and to this day we puzzle as to what caused this hypertrophy of the nervous system was this a selective advantage was this the result of genetic drift was it happenstance and it's really very hard to tell and there are no completely cohesive theories at this point but what happened as a result and there are a couple of papers that I quote in this book is that the old organization of the primate brain which we see in our close relatives in chimpanzees and bonobos and orangutans that old organization became profoundly disrupted it's not just that the brain got bigger but older connections were broken and newer connections were formed primarily in the cortex which is the area in the surface of the brain which is real what neurobiologist sometimes call the connectome of how all these neurons are connected and these novel connections gave rise and we can see this in human artifacts and culture to the development of language of art to our success in social groups and to everything that we associate with being human so we don't really know what the driving force was I think it's a mistake to assume that every capacity of the brain is the direct result of natural selection but clearly these capacities are there or sexual actually yeah or sexual selection so for example you know as you know I read it was very much influenced by your terrific book on Henry Russell Wallace something you I know a lot about Wallace before but I knew an awful lot more after I read your book and that caused me to delve into some of Wallace's original writings Wallace of course was the co-discoverer the theory of evolution with Darwin Darwin might not have published for ten more years or syphilis Wallace had sort of prop poked and prodded him and Darwin was always very generous in giving equal credit ten Rios walls and Wallace was very much an adaptation esteem is always stressing the importance of natural selection but one thing really puzzled him as you pointed out quite well in your book and that is clearly natural selection shaped a brain that could survive evade predators hunt develop techniques like farming find a mate raise children all these other sorts of things these are necessary for survival we can understand why natural selection favors them but why is it that human beings have a brain that's capable of doing differential calculus of composing symphonies of painting masterpieces clearly the tribesmen of New Guinea were not naturally selected for their ability to calculate the derivative of a hyperbolic function but nonetheless no matter how much trouble you all had with math all of us have a brain that can do exactly that now that's where Wallace began to delve into mysticism right and say this must be a divine property the way in which I would describe it and I our Oh scientists like Randy Buckner whom I quote a quote in my book is to say this hypertrophy of the brain gave us capacities that had really not been favored by natural selection but were there nonetheless and it's from these capacities that the things that are distinctly human developed so here maybe let's make a distinction adaptations that have design or purpose behind them functional purpose versus the spandrels or or pre adaptations or whatever want to use Google's favorite example was the pandas thumb it's not a it's not a beautifully designed thumb at all it's just the radial sesamoid bone but there there's a lot of things like that that we have to be careful that every time you look for like what's the purpose of music well it it brought people together and they were naturally selected to be social or something like that you're looking for an adaptive purpose maybe it's what Steve Pinker calls cheesecake evolutionary cheesecake it just came along with it for some other purpose that we don't see anymore so maybe just it make the distinction for us between an adaptation and a spandrel well the I'm sure many of your viewers and listeners and people here are familiar with an extraordinary essay called the spandrels of San Marcos that was written by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and that alone reading that essay made me want to visit that Cathedral in Venice and I finally got the opportunity at just a couple years ago because I want to see these families or myself and I'm not very good I'm not very adept at describing architecture but the great Cathedral of st. mark San Marcos in Venice basically as a series of domes and the domes form a series of basically you say canopies over the floor of the Cathedral and the four corners of each dome are held up by pillars and as a result the shape of the dome comes down into a triangular taper on the pillars and these triangular tapers have a name they're called spandrels and they are beautifully decorated with paintings of the Apostles the life of Christ seen from the Old Testament and all these other sorts of things and a person who did not understand the architecture might think that the architect designed these beautiful triangular spaces precisely so that art could be put in them the fact of the matter is that once you decide that the Romanesque dome is going to be your architectural feature and you put several of them together the spandrels just show up because that's what happens at the intersections of two domes so they're not designed into it there are a consequence of something else now the idea of evolutionary spandrel is basically Gould and Lou Anton's argument against hyper edit page which is to look at every single characteristic of an organism and say what is it for how did natural selection favorite now there are some characteristics that obviously natural selection favoured and that's why we've got them but there are other characteristics that like the spandrels in the Cathedral sort of came along for the ride as the consequence of other characteristics and the joke that he made is a famous satirical musical from the 19th century asking the question what is the purpose of a nose and the answer in that satire was told I glasses obviously and the nose actually you know the nose is very good for holding eyeglasses but no one would say that's the reason we have a nose so anything reason is a byproduct of something else or is it directly adaptive because it helps us make predictions better or survive and reproduce better well the way I would put it is is this and that is that they're awful lot of other animals that are able to survive and reproduce in environments very similar to the ones that we grew up in that we would not say are capable of reason at the level of a professor of philosophy or a mathematician and so forth and they manage to get by just fine so there's something about the level of cognitive function in terms of reason that human beings have that I certainly think surpasses any strictly adaptation aesthetic the and again you know look at the animals that are most similar to us they're very clever they can learn signs and symbols and communicate but there is a gulf that's many orders of magnitude between us and them and you can see a kind of reasoning in them I can see a kind of reasoning in my dog in terms of him watching my bit he's an Australian Shepherd and this partially explains because these are they're very sure intelligent yes and when you get an Australian Shepherd as it goes up the first thing it does is make a study of you and learn what your habits are and your when you will not give it a treat and when you might and yeah I don't it doesn't just wear on Bay he doesn't waste the effort on that he very carefully understands my Muhsin habits and he's able to connect certain gestures in certain times of day with the time when I'm likely to give them some food and reinforce that so reasoning is not an all-or-nothing I think present in other animals as well but its its presence in the human being I think is related to that incredible hypertrophy that resulted in the remodeling of the brain so I don't think it's entirely adaptational right now there's an argument made by a historian science is also an animal tracker who argues that tracking it just hunter gathers that are tracking animals are using a kind of reasoning in which they they look at like the the hoof prints or the pad where it was sleeping and they can see how long ago it left now the Sun is over here it's this temperature so they probably went in that direction and then you know infer from there that they you know left three hours ago so we go this way that's a kind of hypothesis formation OD prediction testing of the hypothesis that you could then scale up to like a scientific method I think that's true and I think certainly we were adapted for that in the place to see in terms of hunter-gatherers and so forth but I don't think it explains the entire capacity that human beings are brave just to go back and rear us Alois Lass's health concern Albert Russell right yeah yeah in terms of does that explain the ability to do higher mathematics is that explained in a symphony and that sort of stuff right well that could be a justice band just comes along with it yeah although it doesn't seem like tracking animals would have the same level of quantum physics [Laughter] yeah so and and then that brings us to consciousness the other big this is such a loaded subject but so you have the easy problem the hard problem the easy problem you know how do we explain the neural correlates of whatever it is we're doing and so you look at the visual cortex you can track the neural networks that fire when you see a face you discuss that research showing the 200 neurons is all you need to recognize a human phase this is extraordinary that our brains are enormous ly complicated they probably have between 70 and 80 billion neurons in them but it turns out that facial recognition is concentrated in a very small number and there's so some recently carry out experiments in which investigators were able to show people pictures of faces and monitor the activity in about 200 neurons as you say and just from monitoring the activity in those neurons determine with a high degree of accuracy which face they were looking at right and that comes very close and determining the neural correlates of consciousness in terms of which nerve cells are firing when you are conscious or perhaps experienced experiencing a particular image or sensation right I like your discussion on the hard problem that so the hard problem is that's the easy problem which is really not that easy but it's release it's solvable yeah the people have described the easy problem have said this is easy not because we're going to solve it even in the next century right but it's easy because we can see how the tools of science might enable us to some right that's what makes it makes I prefer tractable problems right rather than easier well I say my next Scientific American column which I call the new Mysterians the mysterion's are those that claim there's certain problems that are by definition insoluble in science they'll never be solved not because they're super hard it's just their concept they're misconceived their conceptual sexual problems and I think the hard problem is one of those that is what's it like to be something else what's it like to be you or you know does your green look the same as my great boy I'm glad unclench I'm glad you brought that up and and of course lien because and I mentioned this book when I was a little kid I remember thinking about my favorite color was red okay it still is I Drive a red pickup truck okay my favorite color was red and I remember thinking I wonder if Bobby Lanigan my friend across the street when he says something red does red seem the same to him that it does to me maybe his sensation is actually green when mine was red and how would I tell and I told and people say well you can tell what fire is red but no maybe he sees fire is green and he calls that red and I can't tell what this is saying right now the interesting thing is that we are very close to being able to figure out the neural correlates of the sensation of red and what I mean by that is which specific impulse in inputs come out of the rods and cones through the optic nerve to tell the visual cortex in the brain that is the color red that's an easy problem but determining the inner self in terms of what is that sensation what is the sensation of red that's part of the hard problem yeah see to me the conceptual problem is that it's still this idea there's a little homunculus in there with a theater of the mind and that my homunculus leaps into your head to see what your red looks like on your screen and of course there's no such thing as like that although you do point out that you know the famous Thomas Nagel essay what's it like to be a bat you know we can turn and yell at the wall and something bounces off with your eyes closed or blindfolded and you kind of have a feeling like well that's I could tell that's the back and that's the front just based on the on the echolocation so being a bat must be something like that but to really really truly be a feel what it's like to be a bat you'd have to have all the sonar equipment and the neural architecture to run it and so on at some point you would just be a bat you wouldn't be Ken Miller wondering what it's like to be a bat you just be a bad maybe you're a bat wondering what it's like to be Ken Miller but and then you'd never know and I'll go a little a little further think of every color you can imagine in other words think of the entire visual spectrum even the colors we don't have names for it's every imaginable color we can't see anything in the ultraviolet that is a non color to us right birds can see the ultraviolet what color does that look like to them right that's a puzzling question yeah do they have something else up in their visual spectrum that is like a color we can't conceive or think of right and it's a pot it's a puzzling thing to think do you know Donald Hoffman's the interface theory of perception okay so he's a UC Irvine cognitive psychologist I discovered him because Deepak Chopra started sending me his papers and I figured out why because he's basically saying there's no way to know what reality is evolution didn't design is to understand accurate perceptions of reality for the very reason you just gave so his model is that imagine a computer laptop screen and there's the little trash can for example but if you open it up and look at the circuitry there there's no trash cans no trash bag right so so so the metaphor is that everything is just the icons everything in the world we see they're just icons in there and Deepak is always asking me alright Shermer where's the red in your head now I may actually be able to answer it this very research you cited but yeah where's the Milky Way galaxy in your cortex you know it's in there somewhere but it's just neurons firing so that there's some loss of fidelity between the perception of what's out there and we can never actually know what's out there now my rebuttal that this is what it's like to be a dolphin in this sense that yeah the Dolphins image of a shark on its brain is probably completely different it's a picture of a shark than mine but there really are things in the ocean that have teeth on one end and the tail at the other end and it's good to be away from them or else you're going to get eaten so natural selection must have created it not just completely randomness of what the world looks like but some approachment of fidelity of what the real world is like we are well adapted to perceive a reality and it's a reality that promotes own survival existence and reproduction there's absolutely no question about that but to me and I've emphasized this repeatedly in my book there's something that makes us humans different and here's what that something is and that is we can actually analyze and compensate for the imperfections of our own perception and that is we know when we're we may be fooled by an optical illusion but eventually we have the curiosity and intellect to figure out why the optical illusion works the way in which it does there's a wonderful book that I quote from a couple times it's called Cluj by Gary Marcus in NYU he's very I'm sure hey I'm in California everybody knows what a kludge is there's a very very poorly designed system or especially a poorly designed computer program and I put a cup on anecdote in the book that I'm sure you remember I learned I learned computer programming in the 60s where I had to write my programs into punch cards and feed them into a hopper and run them in batch and so forth I passed the course but every time I would write up my programs and take them to a consultant and shake his head and say boy Miller this is a real Cluj it was not a compliment it meant something it was poorly designed awkward used no instructions and necessary had potential pitfalls all sorts of stuff Marcus makes the point that our brain is a kludge it's not a perfectly designed instrument it's prone to all sorts of things misperceptions these optical illusions if anybody's been listening to the what is it the yani oh yeah or Laurel or Yanni yeah we are actually prone to auditory illusions as well yeah but what makes the human mind different is that we are aware of these imperfections we can study them and as Marcus put it we can outwit the inner Cluj and that's is something that I think is uniquely human yep so I think that also gets us to the freewill issue that unlike other species we can be aware of the determining factors in our lives and then try to work around them like my example is I know if I go to the supermarket hungry I'm going to buy the ice cream and a chocolate chip cookies and this stuff like that if I just had a me then I only get the healthy stuff so knowing that future Shermer of what he's like and there's a funny Simpsons episode where homers trying to decide if he should eat the donut or not and he says and finally decides oh that's future homers problem sucker and so we have that capacity we can say okay I know I'm weak right you know if I want to break the habit of cigarettes or whatever I know the variables and now we actually have research you could read books like the willpower book by a bomb meister roy baumeister in which he says here's all the research about like how to eat had it how to resist the marshmallows they can have two of them later this sort of thing so is for you this is and I think for me too this is kind of where free will whatever you want to call it comes into play we can we're part of the causal net of the universe but we're also can affect the future causal variables in the way that we want to direct them yeah and and you know it's I I would say first of all it's very easy to make an argument against free will because in terms of making an argument against free will what you're basically saying is hey there's nothing spooky up here there's not a little me that's right nobody there yeah that's making these decisions without precedent and as a as a biologist I will tell you I believe there is absolutely nothing that happens up here that is not explicable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry and the cell biology of connections in the brain so I think the brain is an entirely natural system in every respect no ghost in the machine no ghost in the machine so what does that mean with respect to freewill well one of the people that I took on in the chapter on free will of course is Sam Harris who recently wrote a short little book almost a pamphlet on free will and Harris's target I strongly suspect Harris's target was theism in the argument against free will because he knows that free will is kind of a correlate of Abrahamic religions and many other world religions as well that we have a free choice between good and evil between right and wrong and Harris argues that we don't any argues basically that there is no ghost there's nothing spooky the brain is an entirely deterministic machine and so forth now as you pointed out in soon to be published and you were kind of Samia briefing yeah Scientific American column this coming month there is quantum indeterminacy which is built into the brain and that makes neural actions to some degree unpredictable but that's hardly the same as freewill and one of things I mentioned in my chapter on freewill is yeah you can map quantum indeterminacy into a kind of freewill but that's not really kind of free well worth having we want something more than that here's the curious thing though that is I think the real question is not whether there's any spooky violation of causation going on in the brain but rather whether or not the brain is an instrument that can take an input and can use the tools that we've been talking about reasoning and perception to come to decisions on the basis of evidence and if we do not have such a tool up there then science itself is suspect and nobody realized this better than Stephen Hawking and one of the quotes I drew from Hawking and I can't reproduce it exactly I apologize for that is is the statement that he had spent his whole life searching for a final theory which would explain not only the origin of the universe but everything that has happened in the universe since its origins in terms of step-by-step causation here causation there and so forth yet the paradox is that if we lack freewill that theory would have specified its own discovery in terms of deterministic events right and therefore we would have no reason for believing the theory to be actually true right and another way of putting it is that science itself is dependent upon the ability of an individual scientists to design execute and then evaluate an experiment and if our reaction to that and our plotting of the experiment is predetermined then we really have no way of knowing whether or not a science itself is valuable then finally and I'm sorry I'm just ranting and raving about it oh this is good there's this wonderful passage in Sam's book where he talks about how much better our lives would be if we accepted the fact that we don't have free will because we could then design more equitable criminal justice systems we'd bring up kids better and all this other sort of stuff and I'm reading this I'm stepping back and saying here is an author who does not have free will in terms of choosing his words urging his readers who do not have free will either to accept that they don't have free will because it will improve their lives and there is yeah there is a very deep paradox is that there's a lot of active active verbs yeah in there yeah well so I mean I just kind of presented this to Sam when he and I did a public event in Austin last month and so his answer to this is you know that we are in the causal net like I can push the variables is that no no it's it's basically tumors all the way down its neural networks all the way down and the fact that let's say I'm in the middle of the bell curve of willpower I'm pretty good better than some weaker than others but all that's just determined by my genes my upbringing my parents my peer group I'm not choosing how much I can tweak the variables and be aware of them that's also determined all the way down well you certainly you know all of us none of us chose our genes that may change we certainly didn't get to choose our parents and there is absolutely no question that the development of our nervous system is very strongly influenced by the environment in which we grow up in the first 18 months of life and all these other sorts of things but to conclude from that that we lack independent agency that the personal judgment is inauthentic I think belies in the face of both logic and experience and towards the end of Sam's book the last three pages I think are absolutely hilarious and the reason for that is as he brings the book to a conclusion he realizes that he has to explain why he's ending the book now and he basically can't explain it and he said I don't know why I'm ending this now any more than I know why I would rather have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea I don't make up my mind my mind makes me up right and that that's a nice turn of phrase which I like very much but then in the end he said I can do anything I want if I choose to use the word elephant on this page I'm a and of course it's so saying he just did yeah and then he ends the book with what I would guard regard is the greatest day memoir in nonfiction I've ever read which is I'm hungry now and I'm going to go have something to eat and that is how the book ends so so I think even Sam is aware of the paradox of arguing against free will and yet explaining why you feel the need to dad think about I know Sam pretty well and he and I are good friends but the idea that he's always saying we don't know where our next thought is coming from this is a guy who can meditate for 18 straight hours just thinking about his thoughts and it's like Sam if you don't know where your thoughts are coming from the nobody does but isn't this the whole point of meditation is to track your thoughts and where they go anyway that's the sort of a sidebar right I do like the quote which I did to him and I've written this study done in 2009 a survey of professional philosophers was like 3,600 phd's grad students professors and so on who do this for a living and the survey was you know what is your opinion of these 27 different issues in philosophy and now this is this is not quite the same thing as a scientific consensus but is it but on the free well question there was you know libertarian free well there's a ghost in the machine almost no one believes that I was a low single-digit number and then compatibilism was the majority like 60% right which is what you and I are I think and Dan Dennett is as well and then it was then the the next number is like 29% or whatever it was determinists and and now that counts for whatever nothing in terms of what the truth is but on the other hand this idea that if you just thought it through carefully enough you'd be a determinist it's like wait wait you're saying that you know 60 percent so you know sixty percent of professional flosses all they do for a living these are the best you know Dan Bennett he's one of the greatest thinkers of our time written books about he just hasn't thought it through maybe the problem is the words we use you know determinism can't also allow free will free will agency we use these active verbs something's going on and I think here it's one of these Mysterians we're just concept we're conceiving it in a way it could never be resolved in any kind of scientific sense I agree and I would add something to that because I quoted Dennett in my chapter on free oh of course he's written a very provocative book called freedom evolves yeah that's a difficult book but I think it's well worth reading but one of the observations he makes towards the beginning of that book is that for many people one of the greatest obstacles in accepting evolution is the belief that evolution somehow rules out free will because it's an entirely materialistic explanation not just of where we came from but how we operate and the point that I wanted to make and as you know because you because you read the book carefully I do not say here is the locus of free will you know I don't I don't don't point to a particular place and say there's a little man there doing this or that the other thing I'm compatible is but I leave open the question as to whether or not we can resolve this but what I tried to point out at the end is that evolution is not the enemy of free will because if we truly do have free will it was evolution that gave it to us even if it's an illusion well there's there's there's an interesting turn of phrase here and I stole this from another author and I'm trying to remember who I stole it from but one explanation for the illusion of free will is the idea that the the illusion of free will was beneficial in evolution because it created a sense of responsibility for our own actions which was useful to social cohesion and forming human groups that eventually enabled us to become the dominant primate on this planet yeah so the interesting thing is that if free will is an illusion it is an illusion that became self-fulfilling because it was favored by a flash yeah and that's what I mean yeah evolution is not the enemy of free life I like this idea of useful fictions you know I mean quantum physicists say well this is all empty space yeah yeah but it's it's it's an illusion of hardness because it's not really empty if they look at the atoms at a different scale or the illusion of the self yeah okay there's no structure in the brain where the self is located yeah but but there's a sort of unified whole it feels like I'm me and or not and and that's good enough for in terms of functioning yeah and I'll put that another way in terms of you know the the D localization of the self one of the questions that Thomas Nagel asks the the author not just what is it like to be a bat which is a wonderful five page essay that everybody should read and ponder but also a more recent book called mind and cosmos and the subtitle minded cosmos caught my eye immediately which is why the neo-darwinian ran a theory of evolution is almost certainly wrong and I saw that says what and when you read Nagle's book which is an extraordinary book they're only 120 pages but he's a philosopher and those are a dense hundred and twenty pages the the the his argument turns out not to be with evolution but with neuroscience and he basically argues that consciousness is inexplicable in material terms and because evolution purports to explain not just our origins but our functions in material terms and evolution has not yet explained consciousness therefore the neo-darwinian theory of evolution must not meet true now I wrote a review of that for the Journal commonweal in which I was I praised nagels attention to the problem of consciousness as a serious issue you got to think about this but also criticized what I regarded his pessimism about where science would go and I made an analogy to arrow in Schrodinger's great book in the 1940s what is life and in that book what what is life Schrodinger puzzled over the question of heredity what was the chemical nature of the gene and he said basically we're not going to be able to explain the nature of the gene by ordinary physics and chemistry we should expect new laws of physics to apply to the propagation of the gene hmm that's almost what Nagel is saying with respect to consciousness well it turns out after Watson and Crick published their work based on Rosalind Franklin's x-ray diffraction pattern in 1953 all of a sudden people realized wait a minute we don't we need new laws of physics or chemistry to explain the chemical nature of the gene ray we just have to under Stan that chemical compounds are capable of much more than we ever thought right and as soon rosalind Franklin for example as soon as she saw the double helix model her reaction was it's so beautiful it just has to be true but prior to that time there was no real explanation as to how this could work there's no new chemistry or physics in DNA there's a new capability but in effect a hierarchy that's built up that explains this and I'm absolutely convinced I'm more optimistic about explaining consciousness than you are I'm absolutely convinced that that will happen with consciousness I like the way you put it that that consciousness matter is not conscious but consciousness is something matter can do it's an act an active verb yes because one of the questions Nagel asks is how is it that the same carbon atom at the tip of my pencil which is clearly inanimate can go become part of my brain and suddenly it's conscious is there a difference between conscious matter and unconscious matter and the point I tried to make which you generously pointed out is matter does not consciousness is not something that matter is there's no individual atom or molecule which is conscious rather consciousness is something that mattered dies so it's a process and I would say the same thing about life the candy bar aid on the plane coming out to Ellie today had a lot of carbon atoms in it more than I really needed but some of those carbon atoms are now alive because they are in me and have they changed their chemical nature at all no of course not they are still carbon because they become part of not a living carbon atom but they become part of a chemical process which we call life so would you say that's also the explanation for the meaning or purpose of life it's it's not built into it it's just something we do if that matter does III would say first of all that the meaning and purpose are human creations yeah just like beauty and the meaning and purpose of things is something that we assigned we may assign it simply because of our great big brains that are basically creating these values and also always getting us into trouble I don't know how many of you have read Galapagos by it but every now and then alluding to that wonderful novel at when I do something really stupid I say thank you big brain that's a recurring line in Vonnegut's novel the big brains are always getting us into trouble but I think these big brains are also we're meaning and purpose come from right and and you know if the the the I don't know how you're going to direct our conversation but let me push it in one direction you okay want to go through it and that is whether the emergence of the human species on this planet matters in other words whether or not our very existence is significant or not okay and that matters to whom well whether it matters to the universe okay okay now that's a rather grand thing to say okay and let's go number number people who read my books at all you're into a kind of chest-thumping triumphalism we humans were the pinnacle of creation were the ultimate we own this planet we can do anything we want with it it's over and I mean exactly the opposite yeah and the way it began the last chapter of the book and I was as you know because you're you're a prolific writer and a really excellent one is when you're trying to put the last chapter of the book together you want to sum things up and you want to give the reader a take-home message and you want to basically reward them for the chore of having going all the way through your book saying I have a final thesis to present to you and I wasn't quite sure I always have once I can begin a chapter I know how to end it but for me the beginning is the hard part to get it just right and it was August two years ago and my own children my own girls will testify to this even though I'm a biologist I'm a stargazing nut and when my girls were little I would wake them up at 3:00 a.m. to watch a lunar eclipse I would drag them out in the winter or the summer to watch a meteor shower and I still remember the first time I dragged Laura and my oldest who's now a wildlife biologist out to watch the Perseid meteor shower in August it was about 3 a.m. and I had chairs out there and I drank both the girls out and laid them down in the lounge chairs sprayed insect repellent all over them necessary where I lived and laid back and unfortunately for 10 or 15 minutes there was nothing and Lauren was saying and then it was a little bitty one and she goes dad that's what brought us out and before she finished the sentence there was a just a searing line of fire that cut from Horizon to Horizon and as she was saying is that I think she was oh my god and ever since then she's loved to go out and do this anything so I'm puzzling over how to start the chapter and I realize from my calendar Oh tomorrow night's the Perseids and that I thought I know how to explain what I mean about new human significance and the way it began the chapter is by saying I'm hoping for a clearer sky tomorrow night and the reason for that is it's expected to be the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower and I'm gonna lie out in my backyard because my daughters are grown and moved away pretty much by myself but on this planet I will not be alone I will be joined by tens of thousands of strangers who share the same obsession with things astronomical that I do and they will lie back in darkness and they will glory in these streaks of sudden fire that come across the sky so what makes humans special of all the species on this planet we're the only ones who know that Perseids are coming were the only ones who would lie out into light at the perseus we're the only ones who seek answers to questions in the stars and that makes our existence as self-conscious matter a point of significance to the universe am i two scientific heroes in this respect and I do a point-counterpoint against people like Henry kee who wrote a book called the accidental species saying we're not that big a deal we don't possess any particular qualities that no any other animal possesses we shouldn't make too much of ourselves our significance doesn't really matter in this respect by two scientific heroes in opposition our first of all Jacob Bronowski and those of you of a certain age may remember a TV series in a book called the ascent of man today it would be is the ascent of humans but the other thing is an awful lot of biologists would be like II would argue there is no ascent you know we're not up there anything else but we're now ski would have absolutely none of that and he wrote things like man is a singular creature we are the creature who may who did not find but made his home in every corner of the earth and he talked about studies of animal behavior by the likes of Konrad Lorenz and he mentioned the fact that Lorenz basically learns about animal behavior and then applies that to humans and says humans aren't really different from animals but Bronowski that says there must be something different about humans because otherwise the Ducks would be writing papers about Lorenz rather than Lorenz writing papers about ducks and then finally my true scientific hero and again neither is there people of faith my true scientific heroes the group of the late Carl snagit Carl Sagan and I'm very proud to say that Carl Sagan is a graduate of Rahway high school in Rahway New Jersey that's where I went to school as well I never met the guy although he did take my aunt Doris to the senior prom and I've heard this is a true story by the way and I've heard about a little bit about him from from from from Doris and sagen basically says we human beings are significant to the cosmos because we are a part of the cosmos that has become self conscious and aware and as enabled for the first time insofar as we know for the cosmos to begin exploring itself and that to me is is is the perfect way to describe what is unique and special about our species right so what do we need religion for the well we can do this if you like and I was I was telling if well because I think that's the answer religion always gave in some way ok so I was talking to a few people right before our gathering began and I pointed on going from one polar extreme to the other because yesterday I did a Facebook live interview for BioLogos though oh boy the organization founded by Francis Collins ray and now I'm going across the coast to talk to the skeptics the way I would put it is is this and that is as a scientist and as as a human being I simply do not find nature to be self explanatory and what I mean by that is the notion that the universe that existence itself that the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics that the fact that the universe is understandable that all of these things are self-explanatory and I believe in a position that goes back to Greek philosophers that something outside the universe is required to explain it now as you know our good friend because he's my friend to Lawrence Krauss a few and more said I have made common cause in many many places including Ohio fighting against creationists he's a good buddy and I really like Lawrence he wrote a book a couple years ago called a universe from nothing and in a universe or nothing he pointed out quite correctly that modern physics explains the way in which matter and energy can arise literally out of nothing that a pure vacuum in other words a space with nothing in it is unstable and matter arises out of it and whole universes can arise exactly the same way and therefore he concludes the philosophy the theologians trump card is he Coleman which is why is there something rather than nothing yeah it has now been answered yeah we know that universes and matter can arise from nothing now the interesting thing about that thesis and Dawkins wrote and enthusiasts afterward to the book as you know the interesting thing about that is the most severe critics of that have been people not people of faith but rather people who you know who identify as atheists yeah and in particular David Albert a philosophy professor at Columbia University in his review in the New York Times basically unfortunately tore Larry a new one and what he pointed out was that when you say a universe can arise from nothing that presupposes the existence of quantum fields and fluctuations and an entire set of physical laws that make this possible where did those come and so you really haven't answered the question right and Lawrence has a bit of a temper went into an internet rave about philosophy basically said what have we ever learned from philosophers you know the last 2,000 years progress has come from science philosophy is nonsense why should I listen for what philosophy professor David Albert has to say about this and what he neglected to do is to Google they have it Albert and he then would discover that he has a PhD in physics and therefore they knew exactly what he was talking about so that ultimate explanation of why is there something rather than nothing why is the universe interpretable and understandable I'm not sure that's a question that science can answer and in that respect I agree with what you wrote in that forthcoming Scientific American issue was to put God as an unanswerable question a God who dabbles in nature a God who is just sort of a a being who does cool magical stuff would be detectable right but in the tradition in Michalik tradition in which I am raised God is not part of nature God is the reason for nature okay and that's why he should remain undetectable okay Wow well I do I do hey you open the door buddy it's all good but but you you adhere to a particular faith Catholicism versus say Judaism I was just on ben shapiro show last week and and and so why don't you accept the resurrection of jesus is the messiah and he had a long explanation and that we the old testament doesn't say messiah and the way the christians say and he went on it and that's true by the way okay all right all right but in other words like when i debate theologians who argue in favor of the resurrection they have their six arguments or ten arguments why it's true well if the arguments were so good then why don't use accept it because they believe even in the same God that you accept and they still reject so there's something else extra evidentiary that has nothing to do with epistemology and what's the right reason or set of arguments or evidence that you just either make the leap or you don't hmm yeah well I'll answer it in a couple ways I'm gonna start out flippant if you don't mind okay and at one point Bertrand Russell great philosopher was jailed briefly in Great Britain I'd I forget what form that was ante against the First World War yeah his opposition to the war and so forth and the jail are on the intake papers had to take down his vitals where do you live were you from and then there was a blank for religion and they asked him what's your religion he said agnostic and the jailers reported to have said well I've never heard of that there are many religions but I suppose we all worship the same God Russell said that kept him laughing at the whole time he was in jail but yeah there there is you know one of the things about science that I think makes science unique and valuable is that there is on this planet a single scientific culture and science is the closest thing we have on this planet to a universal culture what I mean by that basically is if you and I were to discuss art politics philosophy and then we were to go to a university in an East Asian tradition and talk about art politics and so forth we'd be completely out of our element there'd be a completely different cultural way to understand the interrelationships between these various fields and so forth but on the other hand if I was to go to a cell biology conference my field whether it was in China or Japan or Indonesia or Kenya we don't speak the same language that doesn't mean all scientists agree but it does mean that science being empirical basically has a common common understanding of how we test ideas and how we generate theories in a way test hypotheses religious faith by definition is supernatural it transcends the net right and I'm perfectly willing to admit that there are things that are beyond our understanding these ultimate questions as to why are we here is is there a sense of right and wrong why does the universe exist why is there something rather than nothing and I think there are many ways to answer those and I would not claim for a second to have a hammerlock on the truth in terms of saying I can tell you yeah I'm a Roman like and I can tell you why you should be - for me it is the faith tradition I understand it's a tradition with the exception of that Galileo speed bump that's it it's a tradition especially in recent times which has been quite amenable and hospitable and supportive of science which makes me feel very much at home mmm-hmm and it speaks to my own needs for understanding I you know fully accept that there are other religious traditions I don't think we all worship the same God but I think we're all grappling towards the same question and to me that that's the unifying aspect of religion one of my favorite lines from Woody Allen was when he talked about his first divorce that his wife as an atheist and he was an agnostic and they couldn't agree on which schools or which religions not to raise the children in yet it would be curious to know if we came back five hundred years from now after being chronically frozen her son such thing or if we had brain say twice the size of ours we'd go oh it's so obvious we couldn't have seen it but now because of the free will consciousness whatever so and we just are limited based on our brain size yeah well it's nice to think about but unfortunately the paleontological evidence is that the human brain is getting smaller oh that in the last public read it kind of peaked in India I kind of peeked into sort of tapering off yeah and the other thing is that brain size is not the story right you know that that's that's very important to appreciate right um you know there's a the with Albert Einstein passed away there are a lot of people want to analyze his premise it must be very hard yeah it's slightly smaller than normal right yeah but had extra glial cells so I have no I were clean it was a super clean brain well before we turn it over to the audience I thought I'd ask Don and Ed if they wanted to make any comments about some of the stuff going back to the met the middle ear discussion we were talking about determinism and I'm just reminded of things that my friend Steve Gould said a lot in his life which is the issue of contingency and how much there is so much that we do not have any way to anticipate and no organism can anticipate and things that are the random speed bumps from meteorites of space to just you know things that happened that are not part of the biologic system at all that makes life and everything about a very unpredictable which is also a very serious issue for a very hard form of determinism you know that we can't really think that those as you're pointing out Stephen Hawking saying you know we could predict at all from there became the end but the whole point that Google made over put contingency is that not even life is predictable if you ran the tape of life again and again and again you'd always get a different result because there are so many accidents and things that have no you know even better well adapted dinosaurs still died out mm-hmm yeah no I think I think that's absolutely true and I you know I actually talked with Steve about that point I agree with him completely in terms of the general sense of unpredictability and one of my books I brought up a really I think relevant example of historical contingency in in in US history which is at one night in 1944 the the petit patrol torpedo boat pt-109 I was cruising at night and the skipper should have been at the helm but it was rather warm and he wanted to smoke a cigarette so second lieutenant John F Kennedy was lying out on the bow of the ship at the moment that it was cut in half by the Japanese destroyer am aguirre and because he was not at the helm he lived and not only did he live to become president I states but being a champion swimmer from his time in college he saved the lives of several of his crew members and again all that JFK had to do was to be a few meters to one side and know that none of that would have happened and as Gould like to say maybe this time the the meteor that ended the tatius misses the earth by a few hundred kilometers dinosaurs are not driven extinct mammals remain these little furry burrow burrowing things eating up feeding on scraps and primates themselves and of course we never come into existence that's how close things could be in terms of unpredictability well thank you for a great conversation I want to go back to the very beginning where you started because being doing all doing so much work in the history of the creation/evolution legal controversy I wish I had your optimism about where we're going and if we're making progress you talked about the Dover case and you were able to give a few examples of where it helped and it did help isolated here and there right but the problem was it was a district court decision never got appealed and therefore never had the precedential effect that we eventually got with say the decision overturning the Arkansas anti-evolution law in 1968 or the one overturning the equal time law out of Louisiana or actually in a related case earlier but Arkansas but at Louisiana was the final yeah those are those are Anderson vs. Arkansas and Edwards like a lard so those had had somewhat lasting effects but I'll get to get to the somewhat part later the problem with what happened in Dover is even though you made a brilliant job in the decision by the judge was brilliant and that carried some persuasive effects we see all over the country that that intelligent design is continuing to make inroads we see it in roads in public schools it's happening all over the place we also see it making inroads around the world and of course we see it in pro kiyul schools which with vouchers to becoming more popular that's spreading so we've got that issue but we also have a very tenuous Supreme Court if Justice Kennedy steps down next month then there'll be another appointment and right now there are at least three and maybe four justices and that would make five who would rule otherwise on the Dover case we also have states like Tennessee and other states Louisiana and many other states considering so-called academic freedom statutes which have never even been challenged by the National Center for Science education because they fear they'd lose with the current constituency of the courts which Garrett depending on how they're written some of them mandate that students be taught as you alluded to taught about that it's only a theory and there are good reasons to question evolution just as they're good reasons of questions climate change and those those statutes have a great chance of spreading being adopted in more States we've got a Secretary of Education who is a creationist we have just like we have a head of the Environmental Protection Agency who doesn't believe in climate change but it's not just here I just got back from it speaking at a conference in Singapore which is a country that is that accepts evolution and is on the cutting edge of much genetic research but it's it was it was a conference on the worldwide spread of creationism because it's sandwiched between Indonesia and Malaysia both of which now ban the teaching of evolution as do every Islamic country in the world you mentioned Turkey going that way we also see countries like Hungary and Poland where there's increased resistance and even even Russia now increased relations to the teaching of evolution South America they're incredible problems North Korea South Korea there is has become a creationist country where intelligent design is strong as do many of the islands of the Pacific so this is not an area that we can rest comfortably about and we have to watch this with every election in our own country at local levels but also at the national level so that's one comment that I wanted to expand on and what you were talking about while Dover was wonderful it was I'm fear a very weak breakwater I'll agree with you 100% and and one of the things that I mentioned is when Michael suggests that maybe this is all over now and popping up all over place I mentioned pick me Arizona um I can name a dozen other states in which these measures have come close to passage and there is indeed a political climate now that's running against science in general in every respect there's a strong tide of anti-intellectualism in this country and in many others I spoke about five years ago at the tree of evolution conference in Turkey that at met - which is the Middle Eastern Technical University which is sort of the MIT of the Middle East I'm not making that up it's an extraordinary University with wonderful people they all the students by the way want to go to graduate school the United States trust me and I'm sure that I'm sure that is still true but they felt these are these are Turkish students and Turkish professors and they felt under fire from the Islamist I know they're all they're all Islam they're all Muslims but then they nonetheless felt under fire from the fundamentals tied in their own country to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson eternal vigilance is the price of scientific integrity yeah and I think we have to fight for that all the time I was just elected the president of the board of the National Center for Science education and we are going to be doing everything we can to fight for science these places but I want to I once overheard my wife describing me to someone else she didn't know I was listening describing me as a pathological optimist and I will confess that's probably true but one of the things I point out is that Gallup has been doing polling on acceptance of a number of statements for 25 or 30 years and the statement that reflects creationism is do you believe that human beings were created in pretty much their present form within the last 10,000 years the percentage of Americans saying yes to that is now at its lowest point in the last 30 years and what that tells me is that the efforts of organizations like the National Center for Science education of people like you and also of scientists around the country has been paying off to some extent I don't mean hey put our feet up on the dead and everything's cool and I'll give you one example as I mentioned the author of high school textbooks that are used all over the country the state of Florida is currently in the middle of a science textbook adoption so my publisher sent me down to speak of the Florida State science teachers meetings autographed books you know you all take key teachers out to dinner tell them what we got the best book and all this other sort of stuff and our book is really well known for having this strongest treatment of evolution of any of the books and that's that's more credit to my co-author Joe Levine who writes those sections that I am passionate about making evolution the central organizing principle of biology which it is I think many of you may remember that on April 22nd last year and this year there were marches for science all around the country I'm trying to remember his name there is a teacher got it in Volusia County named Brandon Waddell I think it's Brandon Hart okay he is president of Florida citizens for science he's been fighting this creationist I'd all throughout Florida the State Board of Education held hearings on anti-evolution measures and the legislature held hearings on these two weeks after this state this March for science and there were big marches for science scientists and in Tampa and in Miami and in Tallahassee and everybody demonstrated had a really really good time as he pointed out in an op-ed piece in the journal Nature high school teacher getting the whole page in nature very impressive but if he as he pointed out and often peace in nature there wasn't a single one of those university scientists who showed up to testify in front of a legislature when it really mattered well and the editorial was where the hell yeah yeah so we and this is this is the gospel I preached to my own colleagues in the scientific community we can't be missing in action when these measures come up in front of state legislatures local school boards curriculum committees anywhere if we want to continue to be part of the most vibrant scientific community in the war we have to make damn sure it's not cut off in its roots and its roots are in public education and therefore just like just like you I feel this is a battle we have to keep fighting questions or comments from the gallery there yes good back to free will yeah what does reading and been very interested in such a cool elements I've kind of concluded that the disagreements among philosophers is some semantics to some extent and I just don't find that people define freewill before they start talking about it because - only with Galen Strawson yes yeah he has a certain way of real which happens to be the way I look at it but it's defined in terms of back to the idea that the fact that you couldn't choose anything about your genes and environment and then everything else follows through that you in fact don't have you know real free will but you have agency which is a different thing and damn like Danny Danny talks about agency but the hell aren't you with people who are talking about this kind of freewill and it just always surprise me that they they weren't resolving things by just defining what freewill is that was that was one thing I love let me react to that quickly before you go to the next thing which is one should not be surprised to see philosophers debating the meaning of words that is their data because it's and and I think the most difficult thing about freewill and consciousness is every single one of us thinks we know what it is because every single one of us experiences it in one sense or another we experience our own consciousness it's so intimate to us it's much easier to talk about what generates the light coming out of there in physical and chemical terms than it is to sort of go inside and ask the brain to figure itself out which is by definition an accessible object but Michael made exactly the same point with respect to consciousness which is what are we actually talking about this is a key and I think you know you share the confusion that that I have as well when reading different definitions of this by arguing viewpoints Sam Harris completely oh and a free group of us and as a biologist say I understood that but that wasn't even the one that I was interested in you know and I was you know I know what Sam Harris was saying I'm not a fan it is but but I do understand the point that if you do it there is something to be said that if you do accept the lack of free will it is something that allows you to be less judgmental to some extent once you assume that everyone has responsibility for every action you have a very different way of punishing for wrongdoing etc so I do understand that logic the other question I had was I was always confused why people and this was related to the whole idea of stochastic events why you couldn't not believe in free will and also say you don't determinism isn't true and they don't seem to have that combination this you know you can say free will doesn't exist but that doesn't require that you believe in determinism and somehow that seems awesome a suit yeah well III you know as everyone in this room knows the physics in the last decade of the 19th century thought it had everything figured out that we lived in a kind of pinball universe where you had collisions between atoms and even subatomic particles and these collisions were as predictable as billiard balls rolling around on a table and therefore the universe was strictly deterministic and with the discovery of the quantum and particular and radioactivity and quantum indeterminacy it was absolutely apparent that the future state of the universe or any system is not entirely predictable even if you knew every parameter of the present state so that is what is meant by quantum level indeterminacy and one of the arguments I made in finding Darwin's God is that if we lived in a strictly deterministic 19th century kind of universe you could never make an argument for free because every single thing that happened would be predetermined by previous conditions I didn't claim to say that quantum indeterminacy gives us free well but the very fact that the future states of complex systems are not entirely predictable from previous states that makes room for free will to exist in other words if that was not true it could not exist I don't think yeah the the other thing the other thing with respect to freewill is I think Harris's definition of freewill basically is that you have absolute freedom to do something entirely independent of every influence on you every aspect of your genes your upbringing everything else nobody believes in that nobody argues in that if we were to walk down the street and find a wallet there and it had $500 in it in cash and I'm pretty well-off guy and I got royalties and I got a bank account you know what I'm gonna do probably is I'm gonna get the ID I'm not gonna take a dime out of it and I'm gonna call that person up now I'm not claiming that means I'm a good person but let's suppose I was absolutely I was about to be evicted from my house I needed $200 immediately the next weeks rent I need another 50 bucks to feed my kids who are home screaming I'm gonna keep that money okay and you know it's sort of like a Jean Valjean Jean Valjean decision based on based on situation so I do think our behavior is strongly influenced of course by influences around us in previous conditions and so forth so I don't think a certain a kind of agency and I think agency is a better word than freewill a kind of agency to take that in reason about it and come to a decision freely I don't think I don't think that's I I don't think that could be ruled out by what we know about neuroscience Michael said there's also that whatever method you use to come to that your conclusion was also not something you frequent shows there's your ability to make decisions based on yeah well we won't be arguing about words I hope not and I'll explain why but go ahead laypeople they yeah there's no question that people you know sleep like at this point okay well I would put it a different way yeah and that that is a very hard to argue that theory is a much higher level of understanding than fact and what I mean by fact yeah and and and what I mean by fact is here is this particular cell that has this structure this cell has two flagella on it this cell has a certain degree of heterochromatin each of these are facts and by facts I mean a repeatable verifiable experimental observation that's what a fact is what's a theory a theory is is a level of understanding that unifies thousands or millions of observable verifiable facts into an explanatory framework theories never become theories explain facts and that's the way in which I would put it that's nicely put yeah yes sir great I really enjoyed the conversation when I think about you mentioned things like mathematics and ability to draw a symphony and when I think about that I think plus the emergence of language the use of symbols the fact that we can acquire knowledge and pass on to the next generation I started with clapping it took a few generations to get to symphonies so and that's what makes us special is the fact that we have less that we can record things next generation gets to step up and off from the point of previous janitor for generations information so if we put it in a mobile phone on a doll and gave him an internet connection the adult but it's got to say this this thumb is slowing me down oh yeah I don't want this at all well I'm just wondering what you're thinking on that because for me it's making it as simple as that's just the accumulation of knowledge language makes this very difficult well you one can argue that there are lots of other animals that first of all have language in the sense of a sense of ability to communicate the when I was a grad student the University of Colorado I lived in a dorm that was about a mile from the main campus it was a large undeveloped area perhaps 10 or 15 acres and there was a walkway that walked through it sorry the high end of a car so I had to hike all the way to campus all around that walk away was a prairie dog colony and anybody who's ever interacted with prairie dogs is gone exactly what I'm talking about which is there would be Sentinel prairie dogs standing up at the edge of the colony and at a very precise distance I'd say it was about 35 meters the Sentinels closest to me would start going drip drip drip drip drip the pitch of the chirps would increase as I kept walking until finally when I get 10 meters away they disappear into the hole and other sentinels a little farther on in the colony would pop up and they would start chirping they were communicating to the entire group underground where the stranger by virtue of sort of cascading chirps as you walk it was just fascinating to see that's a kind of language that's the ability of communicators but they can't quit they can't write that down they can't pass it on to the next generation that gave us our acceleration as you get to see that's exactly right and the other and the other thing is they're not busy analyzing human society by looking at who's living in all those high-rises and why are there multiple floors and you know what do these individuals mean we are we are the the creatures who have taken upon ourselves to analyze not only ourselves but to other analyze and systematize other forms of life and that began is absolutely unique to humans you approach evolutionary psych in your book cautiously people like Geoffrey Miller argue that things like music or poetry and and the arts and so on are a way of expressing your genetic viability so females are selecting males in a sexual selection I'm gonna pour more crudely okay what Geoffrey says is that music and art is a good way to get laid yeah I wasn't gonna say that but yeah yeah that's it and I'll go further he says for example comedy telling jokes right serves the same sexual selective function and are you ready for this yeah that's why men are funnier than women right that's why there are no good female comics he said I'm sorry I I don't know about you but my hackles get up when I hear some nonsense like that and one of the people I specifically talked about and I did mention Jeffrey Miller and Jeffrey Miller had this you know very unfortunate interaction with the potential grad student whom he said that he didn't want to take her into her into his lab because she was fat and if she did not have the willpower to control her own appetite and always she obviously wouldn't make a good scientist Wow and really this true story it's in the book more carefully but but Dennis Dutton in his book the art instinct is pretty much the same thing right so he says basically art is largely made by men again he's explaining this in terms of sexual attractiveness and so forth and he's also saying that our tastes in art were shaped during the Pleistocene and he imagines in the Pleistocene this stereotype that men were hunters and out there you know fighting the beasts and bringing in the meat and the women were back home I guess sweeping out the cave and tending and taking care of the kids well the fact of the matter is we know almost nothing about the social structure of human side during the Pleistocene so don't give me this the guys were hunters and the women's were tending the women were tending the hardest nonsense and so forth but Dutton basically making this argument for art says taste in art favor drawings that are pasture all that show water animals all children and pretty landscapes right and that's why we think certain artists great and certain art is not and you know I'm married to an artist my wife is a graphic artist with the Rhode Island School of Design she's given me a veritable education every time we go to Daisy she gives the best museum tour lecture I've ever heard she left at that premise and she said look what Dutton is doing is explaining mediocre art if you go out you paint these stereotypical sentimental landscapes that's nice it's going to end up in in motel six or eight okay but what do we regard as great art and we had the opportunity last year to go on vacation in Spain and for the very first time of course I've seen prints of it before but for the very first time I stood in front of Picasso's Guernica a I'm seeing that that's not colorful no that doesn't have any water no it doesn't have any small children it has some animals but it has animals in extreme agony it's the most powerful piece of art I've ever seen and Dutton's theory about art and sexual selection has does nothing to explain it right and as one critic of Dutton book set Dutton's book says what nearly every great painting in the museum of art violates your theory maybe it's maybe it's time to discard the theory tell it the motel 6 art theory but I'll see you sir yeah yeah yeah I had a great conversation I love everything you guys talk about seems like there's one thing that's missing that actually fits in with an epiphany I recently had with a colleague at work who was a creationist and he and I had a constant dialogue about evolution and creationism an idea and all that and we sort of had sort of had to join Epiphany that fits in with what you said and that was that he said despite what scientists say there's no way that evolution can describe how life evolved from dust and that was a keyword so suddenly we watched offline with this parallel conversation about it's not dust it's the periodic table and the four forces of the universe weak strong gravity and so there's a whole structural attempt which we live that evolution does not describe but give them that as a basis and taking that as a given from that point forward evolution works to describe you know why a certain bird has a longer be consider all the way to us and my friend who was hadn't been very well educated in the sciences is he he didn't understand the periodic table and the four fundamental forces of the universe and he didn't understand these scientific assumptions that evolution is based on so for him it was an epiphany and for me it was an epiphany because I realized a lot of people creationists they don't understand that when evolutionists say we can explain so much that we can explain it's based on certain assumptions that we can't explain sort of what you were saying or whatever yeah I think I think you're ready some very good points and you know what one of them is that that word dust is very intentionally chose because of course it appears it appears in the book of Genesis and the I've actually made almost exactly the same point to some creationist after public lectures and you know and I said you know God couldn't have fashioned humans out of dust because dust has far too little carbon and too much silicon and his answer was well maybe it was very special very dumb but but one of the points that creationists love to raise is abiogenesis which is the origin of the first living cell that's not evolution that is a separate problem now I admit if you want to rule out a creation event you have to explain where the first living cell came from so it's a significant scientific problem it's not a solved problem but on the other hand it's not fair to say that we don't know anything about it we actually know that basic physical processes can produce the building blocks of life and they do it all the time and not just in experiments by Stanley Miller very phaeton no relation in the 1950s on this issue but also when NASA or the European Space Agency are able to capture comets in meteorites do you know what they find in they find amino acids so the in the universe itself basic physical processes can produce the building blocks of life and we can go a little bit further a friend of mine friend of mine at Harvard Jack Shostak is working on this and is doing extraordinary stuff along these area but it is agreed an unsolved problem - for evolution take place you first have to have a self-replicating system once you have a self-replicating system evolution can kick it so it's a separate problem when it's it's an important you got it there might be another universe where there's only three elements of the periodic table and the whole universe is just great nothingness because it there wasn't nothing here and complexity to it well yeah got a student from the peanut you know Thomas no it's the you guys touched on it's okay why are you Catholic over any other religion and I'm gonna get more specific why are you Catholic as opposed to all the other Christian denominations okay well well my answer to that is short and simple and the answer is it is the faith tradition in which I was raised it's one that I understand it's one that frankly I walked away from twice in my life deciding it was absolute nonsense that only stupid people believed in God at all and both times I came back to it and I came back to Catholicism in part because again it's a faith I understand I indicate that I certainly have respect for people who pursue other religions I'm not an absolutist Catholic who thinks the only way through salvation is through the church or anything along those lines but I will also tell your questioner the second time I came back to Catholicism and why and I say I just sort of walked away from it I've always been interested in writing even though I was a scientist and at one point in college I took two courses in verse writing poetry writing poetry writing workshops I actually had several poems published when I was in undergrad and I hope by the way no one ever finds reasons but our professor tried to develop our verse writing skills by giving us five or six examples of poems by a very famous poet by Robert Lowell by elizabeth bishop by somebody along those lines and having us write next week imitation poems in that style and i wasn't very good at this but one day he gave me a set of poems and i really liked it and I wrote imitations of these I hand them back and the professor called me up and a couple days after hanging back and said these are the best imitations you've ever written you really like this guy don't you I said I sure do if you said do you know anything about him now yeah you have to remember I couldn't Google him this is before and you know I didn't have an encyclopedia I didn't know I didn't know who Thomas Merton was and he said do you realize that he is a Trappist monk and it set me back in my my heels because here was this guy who had such beautiful command over the language and he had taken vows of an order which include a vow of silence so he had joined the order where you do not speak even though he wrote this extraordinarily beautiful poetry I said I got to find out more about this dude so I go into the bookstore and I find some books of poems which I bought but then I found a kind of an autobiography called the seven storey Mountain which was published in the late 1940s was a national bestseller and it was about his life as a skeptical and very secular youth at Columbia University in the 1940s and I saw it as precisely parallel to my own life in a skeptical and very secular Brown University where as an undergrad in the 1960s and it did two things it disabused me of the notion that only stupid people believed in God that was the first thing and second thing second thing it pointed to this sort of questions that faith can answer now I'll admit that that Merton was Merton was in the Roman Catholic tradition very much but he also wrote influentially towards the end of his life about Buddhism and basically wrote many articles about being a contemplative Christian and a contempt elated Buddhist and he found these two traditions interlocking so I would love to aspire to have the level of belief and understanding that was characteristic of someone like Thomas Merton but for me he was my inspiration to basically say that faith helps to put your life in context it gives you a genuine reason behind your sense of right and wrong good and evil what is the good life and so forth and for me it's been enormous ly valuable in helping for me to the bottom of a better way of describing it get my bearings in the very difficult business of being a lot here you anybody up here in the peanut gallery up there yes and question going back to art and the purpose of our anything a lot of artists would say that the purpose is to evoke feeling and that's kind of what you touched on earlier so if we assume that the purpose of art is to evoke feeling then can we really talk about the evolution of artwork without discussing the evolution of feeling and emotion that's a great point and I'll I will take your point which is I don't think you can you know from our human creation of art goes back at least 25,000 years and some of the cave art that we know about in southern France and other places by modern art standards is extraordinary it's amazing we have an ability and it would seem a need to create images that reflect the world around us and part of that I think is to crystallize experience and I think certainly part of it is to evoke feelings and when you tour a museum and you see the works of the great masters they're not just technically really good paintings photographs going to be that but they are evocative in a way where they're little incongruities or little ways in which people or individuals or emotions are represented that set you back and make you think and you know I want to describe one that is in fact a religious painting but that's not the reason I'm bringing it up my wife my wife is much less religious than I am trust me and we had the opportunity to go to Rome a couple of years ago and we basically made up a hit list of the pieces of art that we wanted to see and one of the problems of that room is a lot of these great piece of art or in little bitty churches that are scattered around the city and finally we went into a church called Santa Maria to Popolo Saint Mary of the people and there are in there too you know absolutely incredible paintings by Caravaggio one of them is the crucifixion of st. Peter and the other one is the conversion of Saint Paul and they're in a little side altar area there was a crowd of maybe 20 people there to protect them from the light from bleaching they're very dim corner you have to drop a euro coin in to get like six minutes of light so you can actually see them I had a pocket full of your recordings pumping those suckers in there and I'm fixed I loved Carvajal I'm fixated on the crucifixion of Paul Paul was crucified upside down sorry Peter was crucified upside down according to legend meant it appears in many pieces of art but in this case Caravaggio allowed himself to imagine what would it be like to have a full weight of a living human body nailed to a cross and being lifted into the upside down position and you can see that the people who are as executioner's straining and pulling at every sinew and you see their agony and you see Peters agfa statistics drug then I look across no farther than that wall and my wife is standing next to the conversion of st. Paul and Paul by legend has been struck from his horse he's knocked to the ground his horse is standing over him and there is supposedly a voice from heaven saying saul saul why doth thou persecute me now there are no words in the painting but I look over there and I see my wife right next to it and tears are streaming down her face and I thought oh my god what happened and I made my way through the crowd I said honey what's going on and she says this for me you have to appreciate she's an equestrian she's a horse lover but there's a lot more than a horse in this painting she says this for me is the most moving painting in the world and for the first time I'm standing right in front of it and I can't control myself so I'm second in your thesis that that's one of the reasons for painting and I think part of Osseo was at for his period maybe better than anyone else at capturing emotion and sentiment and agony and joy and ecstasy in human faces and you can see it in all of his paintings he's all ready to get on a ramp but I just love these do you have an opinion of Wynn symbolic communication or the capacities for symbolism comes online in the human brain hundred thousand years or even why why that way I wish I did but I'm not enough of an apologist yeah an educated educated opinion in those respects I mean the oldest known human languages include things like Sanskrit and Phoenician Ray and they they don't go back much more than about ten thousand years the cave paintings I've spoken about to my knowledge or between twenty and thirty thousand years old right I consider them to be symbolic yeah yeah I'm just wondering why is it or is it possible that the teaching of ID could it be struck down because it violates the separation of church and state oh well that was exactly the reason that it was struck down in Kitzmiller versus Dover and and and I'll tell you what the most compelling testimony was it wasn't mine basically what I was trying to tell the judge is that the so-called idea of intelligent design is really a set of bad arguments as to why certain things couldn't have been produced by evolution that's the so-called evidence for intelligent design but here's what really got to the judge the book that was presented as a textbook on intelligent design was called of pandas and people prior to the trial our attorneys executed a discovery petition a subpoena duces take them I think it's called to the publishers of that book to say we'd like you to produce editorial drafts first drafts revisions and so forth for examination they the publishers sent a 7,000 pages the typescript first drafts second drafts so forth and so on they this went these went to the genuine hero of the trial was it me it wasn't paleontologists Kevin Padian it was Barbara Forrest a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University Barbara went through all 7,000 pages and what she discovered was that the original draft of this book was a book on creation science that referred to the creator this and creator that and this was created and this was done in when was Edwards versus Anka or 88 okay 1988 the Edwards versus a Guillard case the Supreme Court says by a seven to two majority the teaching of creationism is inherently religious and as therefore constitutionally impermissible okay the next draft right after Edwards versus Agha Mart every that the book was unchanged but every mention of creator was changed to designer and what I want you to imagine is that you had to do this in Microsoft Word and do it quickly okay so you would do a global find and replace right so you type in creator and you change it to designer in bingo but every now and then if you've ever done global Find and Replace you discover that a word is sometimes embedded in the middle and when it changes it it makes something ridiculous okay so what what was originally there was something like creation proponents and when they did the global find and replace there was a string of letters together that said see design proponent mists as a single word and that is what Barbara referred to as a literary fossil a transitional form that showed that this was a bald-faced attempt intelligent design is not a perfectly legitimate secular scientific theory it is an attempt to cloak creationism in different language and when the judge saw this that was the decisive thing in the case and that's why he basically said intelligent design cannot conceal its creationist and therefore its religious roots and that's why it's constitutionally impermissible it's a marvelous decision as as IDI pointed out and this has got to sound very strange unfortunately the citizens of Dover agreed and they voted that entire school board out of office and replace them with some of the plaintiffs in the case that's why it never went to the Supreme Court because the only people was standing to appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals was the school board and once the bad guys were voted out the good guys didn't want to appeal so therefore it never went so far as to establish precedent and in a way that's unfortunate just like it would have been very disingenuous for these people to make uphill but as Ken noted that decision was not like the striking down the anti evolution statue it wasn't unanimous it was instead 7 to 2 that included Justice Scalia not everyone believes the same thing about separation of church and state in the real risk now is there going to change the meaning of separation of church and state right there's at least three judges who do not believe in because the whole history of the prep separation truth church and state really those only goes back to justice black in the 1940s 50 so then in time so that could well that was actually a little why so that there's a real danger for example just as Thomas does not believe that the First Amendment separation of church and state applies to state and local school districts because it simply says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment and therefore States and other school districts should be free to do whatever they want and they have justice alito and the latest justice appointed by President Trump who also are in that same so we are looking at a possibility of a fundamental redefinition of what the separation of church and state means in the United States which would lead to a different result now even in the facts as brought forth in York yeah now the other thing that's worth pointing out and point out the First Amendment begins Congress shall make no law okay and I have another daughter who's a history teacher and she's pointed out to me that in the early days of the constitutional republic there were nine of the 13 states that had official state religions and this these were not challenged by the First Amendment in Massachusetts it was Congregationalist and try to remember in Quakers in Pennsylvania New Jersey it was Dutch Reformed Church was Acts the official Church of the state and it was only when the the Bill of Rights was applied to the states as a whole and that happens actually after the Civil War that basically the First Amendment is then construed to apply it broadly in this respect but is and pointed out this may not be said of law and one of the either the great things or one of the terrifying things about the United States Supreme Court is it is not bound by precedent the Supreme Court can do what it wants your thoughts on the singularity and the idea that at some point human consciousness will meld with some form of artificial intelligence and machine learning you've been watching the Big Bang Theory or web world yeah well you know a lot of us you know I might take this out of my pocket and point that I feel absolutely naked when I don't have this around with me and maybe my consciousness has begun to melt in that in some respect and every time I see somebody with one of those little Bluetooth things where they're just strolling through an airport and apparently talking into nothing I think hey I think we're getting a little closer to that but but I think that the current state of artificial intelligence in terms of how close it has come basically to to mimicking human thought or human analysis and so forth I think the current state of AI is much much farther away from that that people believe or that they fear that you know you can do absolutely wonderful things with artificial intelligence in a very within a very limited series of choices and I was struck by the fact I told you I Drive a pickup truck I was struck by the fact that my pickup truck had a kind of artificial intelligence in it that I hadn't even thought of which is when I went up to the truck on the driver's side door and I unlocked the driver's side door that's the only side that but if I go up on the passenger side and unlock it both sides unlock and that tells me that somebody has thought about this limited situation why would anyone to unlock just the passenger side clearly you wanna you want to go in the driver's side on the other hand if you're if there's only one driver you might not want to unlock the passenger side anyway struck me as clever programming and there are other examples of it as well but it's within a very limited range of possibilities and one of the things that distinguishes the human nervous system is our ability to deal with an enormous range of possibilities I don't think AI is there yet I'm not really concerned about our humanity being compromised by robotics they may take some of our jobs away but I don't think they'll know they'll compromise our intellect anytime soon well that would be interesting I you know I'm not I'm not a computer science person so I'm gonna plead ignorance on this we have we have a lot of people at my university working on artificial intelligence and you know what that what they tell me is you know this is going to be a really really powerful tool but always within a always within our lifetime within a limited range of possibilities we can debate whether or not a machine can ever become self-conscious and that's an interesting thing to debate but I don't think that's within the technological realm of possibility there was a really interesting article which I should quoted in my book in The New York Times called the brain as a computer and it was written by Kenneth D Miller I know I have the misfortune to have a very common name I'm Kenneth R I'm a biologist Kenneth D is at Columbia he's a neuroscientist and by the way Kenneth G Miller is at Rutgers and he's a climate scientist and and I and I've met all of them and I get three or four emails a year seriously asking me to chair a session at a neuroscience meeting and my response always is I'd be absolutely delighted to but I know nothing about you want the guy at Columbia and then I get eight mail saying I really despise your your your your stance on climate science and then I have to write it back and I said well I do have a claim stance on climate science but I think you want the guy at what it is and I finally spoke at Rutgers a couple years ago and I wanted to meet Kenneth Kenneth G and he said now I know why people email me complaining about my stance on evolution so so it's all very funny what so I'm sorry to go off of that but like I said you know I know all the Ken Miller's in science at this point I think but Ken's article in The New York Times was basically to say that anyone who thinks that will be able to download our brains into a computer or will have a computer that will simulate the human brain within the next 200 years is being hopelessly naive the the nervous system can be you can make an analogy between logic circuits in a computer and abrade but it's a crude analogy and it doesn't be in to get close to the subtlety and the complexity of an individual neuron and it's multiple connections so the the the brain far surpasses anything we can even conceive of in a computer so I'm not betting on the singularity anytime soon Sheldon Cooper notwithstanding [Laughter] anybody else here to share my favorite bumper sticker said evolution is just a theory like gravity that's right my favorite bumper sticker appeared several copies of it in the men's room at the federal district court house during the Kitzmiller trial and it was put out by a former student of mine in Colin Parrington who was a professor at Swarthmore and the the bucker sticker simply said we have the fossils we win [Laughter] when I visited Dayton right right in front of Dayton college there there instead of no parking it said thou shalt not park here but that was funny that's good and then my other favorite bumper sticker was militant agnostic I don't know and you don't either so with that we we shall end it can't congratulations on your book it's a beautiful book the bravery nicely done [Music] thank you for watching check us out at skeptic comm and support our mission to promote science and critical thinking at patreon

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 19,397

Keywords: Skeptics Society, skepticism, Michael Shermer, Ken Miller, evolution, Science Salon, free will, reason, science

Id: -RAKW6XHCOY

Length: 140min 11sec (8411 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 06 2018